After another hour’s labour we had stacked under the fire shelter the remains of an old cucumber frame from the greenhouse and enough dry tinder to take kindly to a flame. Then, working with my hands under the shelter, I showed them how to strip the bark off a wet stick and make shallow lengthwise cuts in the dry dead wood underneath so that fine shavings curled outwards and the stick looked feathered all over. They each made one with their knives: Gareth quick and neat, Coconut all thumbs.
Finally with a match, a piece of candle, the tinder of dead leaves and flower heads, the feather kindling sticks, the cucumber frame and a good deal of luck (but no cowpats) a bright little fire burned healthily against the drizzly odds and Gareth and Coconut looked as if the sun had risen where they didn’t expect it.
The smoke curled up and out over the edges of the thatched roofing. I remarked that if we’d had to live there for months we could hang spare meat and fish under the roof to smoke it. Apple wood made sweet smoke. Oak would smoke some meats better.
‘We couldn’t live out here for months.’ Coconut couldn’t imagine it.
‘It wasn’t always sunny in Sherwood Forest,’ I said.
We snapped all the smaller twigs off the felled apple tree and added them gradually to the blaze, then made the beginnings of a human-sized shelter by wedging the dead tree as a roof and rear wall between two live trees, bringing more hawthorn to weave through the branches, heaping onto the top and rear surface any boughs, dead plants and turves we could cut and thickly laying a floor below of grass stalks, the nearest thing to straw. Apart from a few drips, we were out of the rain.
Lunch, when we finally ate it after a long forage, consisted mainly of finds from the old garden: some tubers of wild parsley, comfrey and Jerusalem artichoke, a handful of very small Brussels sprouts (ugh, Gareth said) and a rather bitter green leaf salad of plantain, dock and dandelion (double ugh). Never eat poisonous buttercups, I said, be grateful for dandelions. Coconut flatly refused to contemplate worms, the only things plentiful. Both boys fell on the bacon, threaded and grilled on sharpened peeled sticks, and such was their hunger that they afterwards chewed for ages on strips of the inner sweet bark of a young birch tree that was struggling away in the hedge. Birch bark was good nourishing food, I said. Gareth said they would take my word for it.
We drank rather scummy rainwater found in an old watering can and boiled in a Coke can that Gareth collected from the Shellerton House dustbin. They declined my offer to make coffee from roast dandelion root. Next time they went camping they would take tea bags, they said.
We were sitting in the shelter, the fire burning red with embers on its stone base a few feet away, the drizzle almost a permanence, the odd foods eaten, the end of the experiment not far ahead.
‘How about staying out here all night?’ I asked.
They both looked horrified.
‘You’d survive,’ I said, ‘with shelter and a fire.’
‘It would be miserable,’ Gareth said. ‘It’s freezing cold.’
‘Yes.’
There was a pause, then Gareth added, ‘Survival isn’t really much fun, is it?’
‘Often not,’ I agreed. ‘Just a matter of life or death.’
‘If we were outlaws in Sherwood Forest,’ he said, ‘the Sheriffs men would be hunting us.’
‘Nasty.’
Coconut involuntarily looked around for enemies, shivering at the thought.
‘We can’t stay out all night. We have to go to school tomorrow,’ he said.
The relief on both their faces was comical, and I thought that perhaps for a second or two they’d had a vision of a much older, more brutal world where every tomorrow was a struggle, where hunger and cold were normal and danger ever present and cruel. A primitive world, far back from Robin Hood, back from the Druids who’d walked the ancient Berksire Downs, back where laws hadn’t been invented or rights thought of, back before organisation, before tribes, before ritual, before duty. Back where the strong ate and the weak died, the bedrock and everlasting design of nature.
When a dark shade of iron seeped into the slate-grey light, we pulled the fire to pieces and dowsed the hot ends in wet grass. Then we stacked the remaining pile of apple wood neatly under the fire’s roofing and started for home, carrying as little away as we’d brought.
Gareth looked back at the intertwined tree shelter and the dead fireplace and seemed for a moment wistful, but it was with leaps and whoops that he and Coconut ran down from there to re-embrace the familiar constraints of civilisation.
‘God,’ Gareth said, barging in through the back door, ‘lead me to a pizza. To two pizzas, maybe three.’
Laughing, I peeled off my long-suffering ski-suit and left them to it in the kitchen, heading myself for warmth in the family room; and there I found a whole bunch of depressed souls sprawling in armchairs contemplating a different sort of disastrous tomorrow where food was no problem but danger abounded.
